Fisher & Company's Blog

As a professional marketer, I have always been taught to sell the sizzle, not the steak. The problem with selling the sizzle is that often companies begin to rely strictly on the sizzle and forget that what the customer really wanted in the first place was a good steak. 

For many companies, branding has become the sizzle.  Someone in the executive chair is telling marketing to craft messages that are often at odds with the quality of the products and services that marketing is attempting to sell, and gobs of money is being spent to get those carefully scripted message in front of consumers.

When the message fails, the sales and marketing managers eat antacids by the bottle, and in a struggle to meet projections and get back on track a new message is rolled out to the consumers.  Perhaps the new message takes the form of a new logo, a new tagline, or even a new color scheme, but the ads look and sound different as marketing tries to reach and reconnect with consumers through a new message.

And the cycle starts anew. Reinvent the message. Market. Market. Market.  Brand. And back to square one, reinventing the message when consumers opt for the competition.

I am not against branding.  Fact is, I’m crazy about it.  Branding serve the purpose of helping consumers to recognize differences between competing products and services, but constant rebranding erodes corporate and product credibility, and it is fiscally draining to a company’s ROI as well as to the marketing department.  (No one like chasing their tail, especially us creative types.)

Before you brand yourself as being a quality widget maker, you had better make quality widgets. If you say that you are a quality widget maker with exceptional customer service, now you have two things you had better do right and do well. 

Sometimes companies do such a great job of selling the sizzle that the real marketing dilemma occurs when the customer is asked whether or not the product or service has met their expectations. You think you’ve done a great job and are expecting a pat on the back and perhaps a referral or two.  All sizzle and no steak and you might not get the answer from the consumer that you expect. You’re expecting rave reviews and instead you get a ho-hum.

For example, you choose to attend a certain comedy film based on a hysterical movie trailer you saw, but during the movie, even though it is funny, you realize that all of the best laugh lines were in the trailer.  If someone asks you if the movie was funny, it’s likely that you would say no since you were expecting more steak than the sizzle you were teased with in the trailer.

Marketers need to be cognizant that when consumers evaluate a company’s products or services, should the product or service not live up to the message, consumers are more apt to tell family and friends why the product doesn’t measure up more than they are likely to tell why it does.  You can exist on sizzle only so long.  Sooner or later you had better serve the steak.

Consumer disillusionment with your products and services are bound to increase when branding represents messages that are less than accurate in the mind of the consumer.  It takes a lot of time, a lot of lost profits, and a great expense to overcome lost consumer confidence. Can anyone say Microsoft Vista? 

If you are an astute marketer, by now you have noticed the current Microsoft ads aimed at telling consumers that Microsoft Vista is not as bad as they think.  The ads are entitled “The Mojave Experiment” and show consumers viewing a demonstration of Windows Mojave, which they are told is an even newer version of Windows Vista.  The campaign even goes as far as to point out some of the negative things these consumers may have heard about Windows Vista.  Clearly the idea is to show consumers that there is no substance to the negative comments that they may have heard about Vista. 

While this is not an article about Windows Vista, the Mojave Experiment clearly illustrates the problem with campaigns for a product that are all sizzle and no steak, in this case, Windows Vista.

So, examine your current branding message, and remember, when crafting your message, sell the sizzle, but remember to back it up by serving a really good steak.